Mt Crested Butte, Colorado

 We arrived here yesterday in the early evening, as the sun settled behind the semicircle of twelve thousand foot peaks. Returning to a place of birth at the end of a week riddled with violent death. Amy and I first met here. We were struck by lightening here, uncertain what happened to us then. Uncertain still of the meaning and reason behind that delightful accident.

 We stopped by the cemetery to visit Virginia Satir, a woman we owe much to. We stand on her shoulders whenever we teach or coach or consult. The cemetery inhabits a scrubby hillside next to a meandering creek. The tracks are barely discernable as Amy cleans the car's undercarriage with sage brush and rock. Unable to find the turn, we change places and I drive the Grand Am over a rough spot before we top a small incline and find Virginia's grave beside us.

 A hawk stands on a pole marking the small square of concrete filled with rose quartz gravel and a cast bronze bunch of flowers with her signature that marks Virginia's resting place. The hawk spooks as we leave the car in the gathering dusk to stand on Virginia's concrete curb and appreciate her memory. We pick through the gravel, choosing a piece for each of us. When I used to visit here twice a year, I would return my present piece of rose quartz before picking up a new one. This time I arrive without a returning piece, having given my quartz away to a classmate who needed it more than I needed it two years ago. After choosing pebbles, we stand, looking up the meandering creek to the autumn-streaked mountainsides while the sunlight slips up the final hundred feet of mountain top. The clouds are gold-rimmed and darkening. We hold each other close, chilled by the wind and the beauty.

The Nordic Inn is unchanged. We are warmly welcomed and assigned 208, the room that Karen Straka used to stay in when we did PSLs here. The Butte, framed in the room's front window, becomes a shadow as we wash up and change from our traveling clothes in preparation for dinner. A few minutes later, as we enter Crested Butte, we see a gathering in front of the CommunityFirst bank. A vigil for the past week's victims. A parking spot appears and we join the gathering throng. As we step into the crowd, though, a voice says, "David? Amy?" It's Joanne, a student at my last PSL workshop and our last July's Mastering Projects Workshop, her husband David, and David's mother, who is visiting from Britain. We explain our presence to hushed shushes from those surrounding us. How could it be that we would meet people in our community here? Real life could never make believable fiction! We exchange hugs, and handshakes, and whisper introductions before they continue their stroll and we enter the crowd to hear the minister and the Rabbi speak. Someone hands me an extinguished candle in a Dixie cup and we start shuffling, arm in arm, down Elk Avenue.

 Our emotions are quite real. They are not created by simple contact with others grieving. For Amy, the emotions are the feelings that live in this place, the place where she spent the last week of her mother's life. This place watched her decide to change her life. This place encouraged her to follow her heart's desire. It also enticed her to ditch her former life, which was not anything like worthless or completely spent. This is a place of loss and of gain, but her tears remember the losses more quickly than her heart recalls the gains. Others cry for their own reasons. We choke on the lyrics of Amazing Grace, which slips up from the back of the crowd on a gentle puff of grief. We hum our hymns instead. Somehow my throat stays open for a hum when it closes too tightly around even the most benign lyric. My voice sounds resonant and contributes to the reassuring sounds enveloping us. We make our way along the street, each stepping into our own darkness as uncertainly as we remember the lyrics we cannot find the voice to actually sing. We hum and we stumble.

 Our candle is not lighted and I wrestle with requesting a light. I cannot bear to penetrate the private space between my neighbor and myself to ask for a bit of their fire. We are a hushed community, humbled into private spaces and joined together as if we knew we would find ourselves overwhelmed and hopeless here. Somehow a community together, even a community of the overwhelmed and the hopeless, engenders strength and hope. We are reduced to rubbing emotional sticks together, hoping for light. We are warmed by the experience. My candle, still friendly from the fire kept there by its prior owner, is enough warmth without a flame. The light might return, but the warmth from the last fire is enough comfort for me as Amy and I move, arm in arm, toward the last remnants of this sunset.

 These sidewalks are dark but a few small groups of people melt into the procession as we pass. We move forward without seeing any periphery. Candles flicker, fail, and are relighted. We hum hymns out of tightening throats. Private tears humble each in their fashion and each in their turn. The restaurants along the way are empty but their golden lights flicker promise of a warm meal later. We gather in front of the Powerhouse where the Rabbi, holding his candle close to his chest, looks toward the first glimmering stars of this chilling night. A neighbor offers his candle to rekindle our flame, and he and Amy wrestle with the coupling in the capricious breeze. No luck. No fire. The wax is rewarmed by the attempt, however, and we hold our dim but warming cup as we move a step closer to hear the Rabbi's parting words. "Go forth and heal the world," he quietly commands. A rush of realization pushes through us all. We are in a place needing more healing than punishing, more hymns than hegemony. We are a bewildered bunch with flickering candles. We stand together, quietly asking for a grace that sometimes stands in the shadows of our procession. It is surely present, though we might miss it peering through this chilling we try to overcome by gathering together.

Amy and I are strangers here. Yet we find this remarkable capacity to become a part of a community from this wholly inadequate-seeming material. I am no stranger to the feelings I experience as I uneasily march along this shadowy street. I recognize my bewilderment on my neighbor's face, even though I do not know my neighbor. I remember the Psalms, the one reminding me to fear no evil, even though I find myself walking through the valley of the shadow of death. I can always hum my hymns when reassuring words escape me.

As we drove up from Los Alamos yesterday afternoon, we listened as a saber rattling talk radio host claimed that he was tired of all the hugging and the tears. It was, he proclaimed, time for revenge, a time to get even with an evil enemy who had humiliated us with their cowardly assault. I turned the radio off before, as my daughter Heidi later noted, all of the eye for an eye stuff left us simply blinded. My blood can be enticed into a bubbling boil. Marches stir some primordial patriot inside of me, too. But after I turned off the radio, I wondered what "getting even" might look like. Will parity in corpses suffice? Will surprise and humiliation be factored into the accounting? Will we have to become more terrible than the terrorists to balance this deficient account?

I am not angry. I have no palate for revenge. Perhaps I have a poor imagination, but I cannot imagine any benefit from killing more people. This world's history clearly shows that killing people cannot kill ideas. Killing people has never resolved anything. So why the talk of retaliation now? Have we forgotten the lessons so clearly taught by the many generations of those upon whose shoulders we now stand? My America does not cry out for revenge, but it is crying. I encourage those who believe that revenge is necessary to spend a couple of days in a morgue or a quiet scrubby hillside cemetery, among those who have finished their work here. They will see there the peace and humility they are wishing for their enemies. We will all join these peaceful neighbors soon enough without hurrying each other on our way by looking for revenge. If death settles such accounts, this account will certainly settle itself soon enough.

 As the Rabbi slips into the shadows, Amy and I turn to leave this gathering. A golden light floods into the street through an opened saloon door behind the crowd. Just inside, a young man in a red polyester cowboy outfit holds a baritone and a young woman in a slinky white dress holds a small white mother of pearl accordion. As the grieving gathering turns to leave, the cowboy stomps one foot, counting in a loud voice, "A one, and a two, and a three, four!" and he and his partner begin dancing around, playing an oompah ragtime tune. We stick our smiling faces through the doorway to be warmed by the delightful melody before stumbling uncertainly along the street to find our warming dinner.

david